Colonial Williamsburg Research Division Web Site

Kendall-Gardner Site: Summary of 2003 Excavations

by Meredith M. Poole

Introduction

During the summer of 2003 the Department of Archaeological Research, with assistance from students from the College of William and Mary, excavated an eighteenth-century sawpit just west of the George Wythe property, north of the Bruton Parish Churchyard. Though vacant today, Colonial Lot 241 was occupied successively, during the late 1760s and early 1770s, by two carpenters, Joshua Kendall and James Gardner. Advertisements printed in the Virginia Gazette provide accounts of the types of work that Kendall and Gardner performed-everything from painting and gilding to sash-making and plumbing. Yet, the appearance of this carpenter’s yard remains sketchy. The purpose of the 2003 excavation was to gather physical evidence for the Kendall-Gardner trade site, enabling Colonial Williamsburg to reconstruct an historically-accurate carpenter’s yard sometime in the future.

Project Background

The sawpit on which the 2003 excavation focused was first noted in 1938. In that year the Wythe property was explored through "cross-trenching," the then-current method of locating buried brick foundations by digging closely-spaced shovel trenches. James Knight, the architectural draftsman in charge of the project, recorded three significant features on the portion of that lot once occupied by Kendall and Gardner. The first was a large rectangular pit measuring 13 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 6 feet deep; the fill of this pit was dug out in order to measure and record its dimensions. The two remaining features appeared to be the robbed cellar holes of two structures. Again, these were excavated for recording purposes. No interpretation was offered for these features, nor were they incorporated into the 1940 reconstruction of the Wythe property, though it was believed at the time that all three had something to do with the George Wythe household.

Figure 1. 1938 excavation map showing significant features on Colonial Lot 241. The sawpit is in Area A-5, and the two robbed cellars are in Areas A-3 and A-4.

Figure 2. 2001 excavation areas showing partial sawpit and eastern cellar excavations. The sawpit area was re-opened in 2003, so that the pit backfill could be fully removed.

In 1958, new documentary research uncovered the fact that George Wythe had actually never owned Colonial Lot 241. When, though additional probing, Kendall and Gardner emerged as tenants on this rental property, Colonial Williamsburg carpenters requested an archaeological re-examination of the three features to determine whether they represented elements of a carpenter’s yard. The resulting project, undertaken in 2001, accomplished the excavation of approximately two-thirds of what we now feel confident is a sawpit, and sampled the fill of the eastern of the two robbed cellars. This partial excavation produced an astounding number of artifacts, and when the project ended in December 2001, it was due not only to the approaching winter, but to a lack of funding with which to proceed responsibly on so rich an archaeological site.

Kendall-Gardner Excavation 2003

In 2003 renewed funding permitted archaeologists to return to the Kendall-Gardner site with two goals. The first was to complete excavation of the sawpit in order to record final dimensions, examine the sawpit for evidence of a wooden or brick lining, and to recover artifacts that might define the types of activities taking place on the site. A second, and more pressing, objective of the 2003 excavation was to find evidence of a structure protecting the sawpit from the elements. (After two summers of excavation, the second of which was very rainy, it became clear to a soggy excavation crew that an uncovered sawpit in this location would have been useless due to frequent flooding.)

Figure 3. Profile of Kendall-Gardner sawpit at the end of 2001. Note the V-shaped profile of the pit, and the large number of objects in the remaining backfill.

Figure 4. Photograph showing the east end of the excavated sawpit. The bottom of the pit was clearly definable.

Between May and early August 2003, field school students excavated the remaining third of the sawpit fill. Although archaeologists were aware that this fill had been excavated in 1938 and thrown back into the pit once its dimensions had been recorded, they remained hopeful that earlier crews had left pockets of fill to be examined first-hand. Sadly, this was not the case. Measurements taken near the bottom of the sawpit revealed dimensions nearly identical to those recorded in 1938, indicating that both groups of excavators observed the same boundaries. Measurements at the top of the sawpit, however, were considerably larger than those recorded in 1938 (15½ feet long by 8¼ feet wide, versus 13 feet long and 4 feet wide as recorded in 1938). Evidently Knight’s crew left this feature open for a considerable amount of time, during which the sides eroded significantly. Careful examination of the pit sides near the bottom, where the edges were more intact, revealed no evidence of a wooden or brick lining, suggesting that the Kendall-Gardner sawpit was relatively crude.

Though frustratingly jumbled by virtue of having been excavated in 1938, the artifacts contained in the sawpit fill still revealed much about the site’s long and varied history. Pieces of dressed stone found in the pit are likely to have originated in Bruton Parish church, and were probably deposited on the site before 1750, when construction of a church wall physically separated these contiguous properties. A significant assemblage of colonoware, a locally-made earthenware thought to be used and/or produced by slaves, suggests an African-American presence on this site or nearby. Other artifacts can be tied with some certainty to Kendall or Gardner: pieces of a pit-saw blade and a number of pieces of worked and un-worked lead.

Evidence of later occupation is equally intriguing. French gun flints, wig curlers, regimental buttons, and a collection of French wine bottles are traceable to a detachment of the Bourbonnais Regiment encamped on this property during the winter of 1781-82. Additionally, the sawpit yielded a surprising number of coins, which may have been the product of Richard Collins, tenant on Lot 241 from 1777 to 1779. Colonial Williamsburg carpenter Noel Poirier has recently uncovered an account written by Henry Hamilton in which Hamilton describes his 1779 imprisonment in Williamsburg, and the fact that he shared a cell with a "Mr. Collins," who was held for counterfeiting.

In addition to completing excavation of the Kendall-Gardner sawpit, archaeologists successfully identified the structure that covered it. Sawpits are uncommon archaeological features in the Historic Area. In fact, the only other known example is the James Wray sawpit, identified in 2002 just two blocks to the west of the Kendall-Gardner property. The Wray sawpit was covered by a post-supported structure, measuring approximately 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, which was found archaeologically by regularly-spaced post impressions in the ground. Not only did this fortuitous discovery provide an example of what the Kendall-Gardner structure might look like, it also, through the use of scaled drawings, allowed archaeologists to predict where they might find posthole evidence in relation to the pit.

Figure 5. Comparison of the Wray and Kendall-Gardner sawpits prior to 2003. This projection was used to define the 2003 excavation area.